Between Knowing and Doing: The Science That Makes Coaching Work 

Dr Brian Marien, Co-Founder, Positive Group 

Most leaders who come to coaching already know what needs to change. They know they need to delegate more, have the difficult conversation sooner, stop absorbing the team’s anxiety and start redirecting it. The knowledge is not the problem. The gap between knowing and doing is, understanding why that gap exists, and what it takes to close it, is where the science of coaching begins. 

This is one of the most consistent findings in behavioural science, and one of the least acknowledged in how organisations invest in leadership development. We assume that if people understand something clearly enough, behaviour will follow. It rarely does. 

Between stimulus and response, there is a space 

The reason is neurological. The brain is not primarily a learning machine, but a prediction machine. Under pressure and uncertainty, it defaults to familiar patterns, not because they are optimal, but because they are known. These patterns become self-reinforcing over time. The more a response is repeated, the more it becomes the path of least resistance. This is why a leader can understand their habits with perfect clarity and still become controlling, avoidant or indecisive when the stakes rise. Awareness is the entry point to change. It has never been the mechanism of it. 

Viktor Frankl observed that between stimulus and response lies a space, and in that space lies our freedom. Behavioural science has spent decades understanding what determines the size of that space, and how to widen it. 

Change happens not through insight but through experience. Specifically, through new experience that generates new evidence that updates the assumptions, beliefs and emotional responses driving behaviour in the first place. The coach’s role is to create the conditions in which that evidence can land. 

In practice, this looks like behavioural experimentation. Rather than offering insight or advice, the coach works alongside the leader to identify the thoughts, emotions and assumptions driving a recurring pattern and design practical ways to test it. A leader who believes that challenging a colleague directly will damage the relationship does not need to be told otherwise. They need to try it, carefully and deliberately, in a real situation and then review what actually happened. The outcome updates the assumption. The next experiment is refined. Over time, the pattern shifts. Leaders leave with evidence, gathered from their own behaviour in their own context, that a different response is possible. 

Emotion is not a barrier to change. It is the medium through which change happens. 

Our research into AI leadership revealed something that applies far beyond the AI context: emotional state shapes cognition itself, influencing what feels threatening, credible or safe long before conscious reasoning fully engages. Under sustained uncertainty, the threat response can remain persistently active. Attention narrows, ambiguity feels more threatening, and the priority shifts, often imperceptibly, from finding the best course of action to avoiding the wrong one. Organisations frequently interpret this as strategic caution, but in many cases it is psychological protection. 

Effective coaching works with this reality rather than against it. Emotional regulation, the ability to notice, name and respond to affective states and psychological flexibility, the capacity to step back from unhelpful mental patterns and choose values-guided action are among the most robust predictors of adaptive functioning across contexts, and they can be built deliberately and incrementally through structured, evidence-based coaching that targets them directly. 

The organisational case 

The value of this approach extends well beyond the individual leader. Research points to what might be called a coaching ripple effect where improvements in one leader’s behaviour spreading through working relationships and organisational networks in ways that are difficult to achieve through any other intervention. This is consistent with what we know about how organisations actually change. Emotions, beliefs and behaviours are socially contagious. Individual change only lasts when the environment around it changes too and leaders, more than anyone, shape that environment through how they show up under pressure. 

Adaptive organisations are not those with the smartest people. They are those with the most adaptive patterns. Coaching, when it is grounded in science and connected to the wider conditions in which leaders operate, is one of the most direct routes to building them. 

Want to explore cognitive behavioural coaching further? Join us for The Science of Coaching — our upcoming session with Dr Brian Marien and colleagues — or book a call directly with our team.  

Register here: From Insight to Impact: The Science of Behaviour Change in Coaching – Positive Group